AI and Artists
Part 1: Art is a critique of the status quo. AI is the status quo.
“Is AI an existential threat to artists?” The question is in the air, whether one expresses it explicitly or not. I propose that it’s the wrong question. It does point towards another one though, a more perennial one, that is always worth asking. That question is: “What is the meaning and value of art, right now?”
In what follows, I will articulate some of my own answers to that question, both as a musical artist, and as someone who engages in the works of other artists. These are provisional answers. Art, being non-static, changes in tandem with society. Society’s conclusions about art change accordingly. This change, this absence of any final consensus, is a necessary feature of art, if it is to retain one of its great values: as a critique, of the status quo. The status quo may apply to that society – its political structure, and the moral direction it fosters. Yet a great deal of art is engaged in critiquing itself. However unwelcome, AI in its present form is handing artists of all stripes an opportunity for this kind of self-critique. Simply put, I believe that the best way out of the impasse (if one sees it as that) is through art itself.
Art continuously regenerates by questioning its own insularity, its own easy assumptions about itself. Subverting or even destroying a previously accepted meaning, though, has a purpose, which is to uncover a greater meaning. That meaning appears as new and revelatory, yet also, as something that has been found again and recovered. Art is a human expression which has this unique dual ability to undermine the status quo, and in doing so, reveal deeper truth that was obscured. The truth an artwork reveals is immaterial and essentially irreducible. I will try to point to it obliquely here. For now, though, if the reader will at least consider my working definition of art – there are many competing definitions – then I invite them to consider in turn this next assertion: AI cannot create art. AI cannot create art because it cannot subvert the status quo; it cannot subvert the status quo because it is the status quo. No matter how nuanced the content it provides us, it can only be what already is; it cannot imagine what has not yet come to be.
